Conclusion

The Conclusion talks about fractures and continuities, and highlights at least two common processes. If many elements can support the idea of the 1500s as a turning point in the history of Europe, this volume is more open to continuities than to fractures. In the 1300s and 1400s, therefore, the polyphonic, vibrant, and sometimes contradictory fabric of politics, culture, and society takes centre stage. From such complexity, the legacy of this period to the following centuries is represented by two parallel processes. The institutional and constitutional framework of power and authority showed a thickening and defining of its many forms, but politics remained a field open to many contrasting solutions. And the emergence of a more defined written and spoken agency of individuals and groups that had previously been less visible created cultures and languages of power that rewrote tradition and enabled the many authors of such new languages to make themselves heard.

Space, time, and the world

Conceptions of space and time have conventionally lent themselves to characterizations of late medieval Europe as an ‘Age of Discovery’. These characterizations underpin an account of historical ‘progress’ which is technological, intellectual, and social. Coupled with other retrospective ‘modern’ projections—Renaissance humanism and the rise of ‘the state’—they present a teleological narrative of empirical, rational, and scientific discovery at the waning, even the end, of ‘the Middle Ages’. By qualifying and revising such a narrative, this chapter invites appreciation of a more complex historical reality, a necessarily plural and fragmented picture of socially and culturally conditioned ways of seeing space, measuring time, and understanding the connections between them. The discoveries of the fifteenth century emerge, as a result, not as the reflection of a brave new vision of the world, a shift from ‘religion’ to ‘science’ or from ‘medieval’ to ‘modern’, but rather as a reconfiguration of representations of what was already known. This was certainly an age of conceptual change and development but one which was characterized as much by refining, re-ordering, and reconnection as it was by innovation and discovery.

Introduction

The Introduction frames the volume and summarizes both the structure of the book and its main themes. Of all the sub-periods in which European medieval history has been divided over time, the later Middle Ages is possibly the one on which the burden of past and current grand narratives weighs the most. Chronological and geographical boundaries are blurred, and models and narratives of decline and modernity have shaped our understanding of the centuries between c.1330 and c.1500. The introduction to a much-needed rewriting of the history of this period focuses on the main events (such as the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the Great Schism) and processes (such as the expansion of the Ottomans and the maritime journeys outside the Mediterranean), and the main features of the period (the nature and multiplicity of political agency, social variety, economic complexity, growth of literacy and cultural change), and highlights the new historiographical trends in study of these two centuries.

The church and religious life

Late medieval Europe identified itself as explicitly Christian and specifically catholic. Christianity provided moral and ethical guidelines for organizing and structuring human society; it also presented moral and ethical challenges to contemporary social structures and practices. It accordingly provoked constant debate on issues like the violence of warfare, the validity of lending money at interest, social differentiation, and relations with other religious traditions. These were also traumatic years in the western church’s institutional history, especially for the papacy. Preceding evolutions continued and were consolidated, but there was also reaction as obscured tensions and ambiguities became more apparent, revealing fissures and forces which threatened the church’s status and its claims to catholicity within Europe. The chapter deals with a broad range of issues: the papacy; ideas about the church, the pope, and conciliarism; the evolution of national and local churches, the lower clergy, and the religious orders; and, of course, spirituality, heresy, dissent.

Culture and the arts

The later Middle Ages as a cultural period has been shaped by the Burckhardtian tradition: Burckhardt drew a sharp distinction between the ‘medieval’ outlook he believed had prevailed north of the Alps and the ‘rebirth’ of classical antiquity he saw taking place in the Italian peninsula. Over the past 60 years, however, the validity of such a contrast has been called into question. As a consequence, it is now generally accepted that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were characterized more by diversity than by division. This chapter examines how, in every field of cultural endeavour, from painting and sculpture to poetry and music, there emerged a series of quite different, often heterogeneous trends. Originating in different parts of Europe, these were transmitted across the continent, where they interacted with parallel developments elsewhere. The effect was less that of a concerto than of a rich and discordant symphony of competing voices.

Global Middle Ages

This chapter considers societies and cultures outside western Europe from the early thirteenth to later fifteenth centuries by focusing with particular intensity on eastern Mediterranean societies. Rather than offering micro-surveys of a series of different contexts, some close to Europe and others further away, the chapter considers the late medieval world in global terms. The discussion focuses on the creation, projection, and realization of power by rulers during a period which has traditionally been associated with widespread turbulence and disintegration, and yet in which certain commonalities of political structures and culture can also be perceived. The global approach is comparative and largely political, but it also analyses dynamics which relate more to connectedness on social, economic, and cultural levels, and which also often involved movement over scales of all sorts: local, regional, transregional and even intercontinental. The principal relationship examined is between those with aspirations to high, supralocal power, and those who peopled the more fluid, fractured, and sometimes highly mobile formations that typify so much of the economic, social, religious, and cultural landscape of the late medieval centuries.

The economy

The economic history of the late Middle Ages is substantially better documented than that of earlier ages, thanks to thirteenth-century improvements in administration and commercial organization, and to the growth in urban literacy and numeracy. It is also substantially more complex, in that it includes no fewer than three distinct sub-periods: the tail of a secular wave of demographic and urban growth, economic expansion, and growing international trade associated with the late twelfth and thirteenth-century ‘commercial revolution’, that came to an end in the early 1300s; a century or more of demographic, economic, and social ‘crisis’, ‘involution’, ‘depression’, and ‘structural change’ ending in the mid- to late 1400s; and the first stages of a new, more dynamic, market-oriented, early capitalist upswing that lasted to the early 1600s. Consequently, interpretations of such a complex era have been intensely controversial. The chapter deals with the discussion and revision of the main issues related to such complexity.

Society, family, and gender

A shared understanding of Christianity as the foundation of society in this life and in the next; a predominant acceptance of classical Greek texts for understandings of the human body and of sexual differences between men and women; an overwhelming dependence on patriarchal structures with implications for constructions and experiences of masculinity and femininity; and an ideal of family and of community relationships (whether secular or religious) from which no individual could readily claim isolation were touchstones throughout late medieval Europe against which normative values were constructed. Marginalized and often persecuted groups, such as Jews, sodomites, or heretics, were understood and defined against this normative backdrop. That said, by the end of the period increasing political and legal consolidation of societal structures led to their interrogation by those whom these same structures excluded or constrained. The result is an image of surprising fluidity and change in society, family, and gender.

Power, government, and political life

The chapter offers a survey of the central features of later medieval political life. It was often bloody, but the resort to bloodshed was politically purposeful, and the focus on individuals reflected the parts they played in larger frameworks of power. Those frameworks were both ‘private’ and ‘public’—they were followings of men and women, linked together in relationships of marriage, service, or friendship for mutual advantage; but they also involved the performance of official roles, the negotiation of public business, the management of institutions. The frameworks of power were national, international, and ‘transnational’. Europe was divided into self-conscious political spaces, each with a measure of sovereignty and identity, but these spaces also overlapped and, within virtually any political setting, authority was contestable: it involved a complicated mixture of relationships among elites and much wider movements, voiced and promoted by representative assemblies and popular revolts.